The famous Arden family treasure has been missing for generations, and the last members of the Arden line, Edred, Elfrida, and their Aunt Edith, have nothing to their names but the crumbling castle they live in. Just before his tenth birthday, Edred inherits the title of Lord Arden; he also learns that the missing fortune will be his if—and only if—he can find it before he turns ten. With no time to lose, Edred and Elfrida secure the help of a magical talking creature, the temperamental Mouldiwarp, who leads them on a treasure hunt through the ages. Together, brother and sister visit some of the most thrilling periods of history and test their wits against real witches, highwaymen, and renegades. They find plenty of adventure, but will they find the treasure before Edred’s birthday?

Quotes

I love E. Nesbit—I think she is great and I identify with the way that she writes. Her children are very real children and she was quite a groundbreaker in her day.— J.K. Rowling

New York Review Books deserves a medal for its burgeoning collection of reissues of out-of-print children’s books, books that need to see the light of day in the hands of a new generations of readers, books such as T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, Wee Gillis, by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson, a slew of books by Esther Averill and, of course, the incomparable Ms. Nesbit’s The House of Arden…Magic, mayhem and time travel ensue… The book is a treasure itself, a slice of Edwardian life…— The Globe and Mail

[Nesbit] could present everyday people caught up in supernatural situations just as naturally as she permits the realistic details of everyday life to obtrude into her world of fantasy.— The Horn Book

A good case could be made for E. Nesbit as the best writer for children ever.— Washington Post Book World

About the author

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) wrote more than sixty books for children under the name E. Nesbit, including Five Children and It and The Story of the Amulet. After a nomadic childhood—living for periods in London, Europe, and a country manor in Kent—Nesbit married a young Socialist businessman named Hubert Bland. Not long after the marriage, Bland became ill and his business floundered. Having written poetry in her teens, Nesbit found she could support her family by selling stories and poems to magazines and greeting-card companies. She did not experience true success, however, until the age of forty, when she began publishing novels for children. Throughout much of her life, Nesbit was at the center of a community of artists and political activists; both she and her husband were founding members, along with George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, of the Fabian Society, a Socialist group with close ties to Britain’s Labour Party. Even in old age, Nesbit considered herself a child in an adult’s body, writing in her autobiography that if others like her were “ever recognized for what they are, it is when they happen to have the use of their pens—when they write for and about children.”